Seeing how twin earthquakes had leveled apartments and devastated northern Venezuela last month, web developers in Argentina and Colombia were desperate to help despite being far away.
Through their Florida-based company, they quickly tried to make a website to report missing people, said Miguel Angel Rincon, the firm’s product management officer. Concerned about colleagues, relatives and friends, developers hundreds of miles from Venezuela canceled plans and skipped sleep to quickly spin a website out of thin air.
“It’s the only thing we can do,” Mr. Rincon said in an interview.
Less than six hours after the earthquakes, the company, the Empire, launched its site, called Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, or the Venezuela Earthquake Missing. It immediately began receiving missing person reports, and within 24 hours it listed more than 60,000 entries. Government officials, in the first days after the disaster, said hundreds were trapped and missing.
Crowdsourcing sites have limitations, especially as people submit the same missing person more than once or site operators struggle to keep track of those rescued or found dead.
But in the aftermath of Venezuela’s earthquakes, the site’s stark figures quickly began to be cited by news organizations, Venezuelan opposition figures and others as evidence of the disaster’s severity and the gaps in the government response.
“The need for the platform was urgent and immediate from the very first minute,” said Mr. Rincon, who is based in Bogotá, Colombia.
Many Venezuelans have expressed anger over the government’s early handling of the earthquakes, facing shortages of heavy equipment, medical supplies or other critical aid. Civilians raced in sometimes chaotic ways to help each other, ferrying food, shovels and water by motorcycle and digging through the rubble with their hands.
President Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela has sharply defended the government response, saying that critics were politicizing the disaster in a “disgraceful” fashion. “We did not wait one day, two days or three days,” she said at a news conference on Thursday. “We activated immediately.”
She acknowledged that the first people to arrive at many collapsed buildings were survivors, relatives and neighbors, but said that “the Venezuelan government and its authorities have spared no effort, public, private, national or international.”
The official death toll, which was 3,342 people as of Monday, has steadily increased. Experts say the true number is likely far higher, and may never be accurately known. Venezuela’s government has not given an updated official figure for missing people.
Since the launch of the Empire site, multiple others have emerged providing similar information — and faced similar problems like duplicate, outdated and false submissions.
On one site, Venezuela Reporta, at least 10 people have reported the same person missing, said Carlos Ruiz, the Miami-based web developer behind it. He and others acknowledged those issues, and said they were working to clean up the data.
Mr. Ruiz said that he originally wanted to consolidate Venezuelan government resources into one place, but also decided to publish a missing persons database. “It was a solution at the moment,” he said.
Such websites are not completely new. A similar crowdsourcing initiative appeared after the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, for instance.
That was an early example of crisis mapping, in which volunteers compile and distribute basic information online, said Stephen Livingston, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.
The accuracy of these crowdsourcing compilations has always been subject to scrutiny, he said. But in Venezuela’s case, he said the government is struggling both to make an adequate response and to present its legitimacy at home and abroad. Ms. Rodríguez took power as acting president early this year with President Trump’s backing after U.S. forces seized her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and after years of economic crisis and mass emigration.
“They do not want, first of all, these crowdsourcing platforms to highlight their shortfalls,” Mr. Livingston said. But the Venezuelan people need no reminder of their government’s poor response, he said, because they are living that reality.
Some of the site operators are now collaborating, too, as they try to clean up their databases. Mr. Rincon, Mr. Ruiz and Julia Mariano, a paralegal from Miami who also developed a website, did not know each other before the earthquakes, but are now exchanging data to improve their sites.
“That feeling of being unable to act, of being so far away, pushed me to do something,” Ms. Mariano said. Other volunteers have joined, she added, saying that dozens of people from around the world have helped her review the site’s data and fortify it against cyberattacks.
Mr. Ruiz said he and his newfound colleagues hope to pass along their code to others in the aftermath of another disaster. “We want to make sure everyone in the world learns from this experience,” he said.
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